Plane travel causes this strange craving

If the only thing you crave while in a flight cabin is a glass of wine and a decent meal, then you might be surprised about the findings of a recent study conducted at New York’s Cornell University.

According to the report, loud noises like that of a busy plane cabin, can actually affect your taste buds and the intensity of the ingredients you’re eating.

Foods that are particularly sweet don’t register so well in noisy environments, while savoury foods have a much more intense and rich flavour.

You might have noticed this yourself, especially if you’ve craved tomato juice while on a flight. The study found that the constant noisiness of a plane cabin leads people to crave tomato juice over any other drink. Except a glass of champers, surely.

Well, professor Guillaume De Syon says that there’s a long tradition of tomato juice swigging on flights and it all began in the early days of commercial travel.

“The flights were very noisy, there was a lot of vibration, you could hear the engine much more than you do nowadays, so drinking actually was a nice way of calming the nerves,” says De Syon.

“Once you got bored of course you would drink some more, and before in-flight entertainment, such as movies, this is what people did, to the extent that by the time they landed, say from a trans-Atlantic flight, it was not uncommon to see passengers completely drunk, trying to get through customs.”

Even though many people don’t drink tomato juice while they’re on the ground, they’re often surprised to find that they crave the juice while up in the air.

So, if you’re taking a flight soon, don’t be surprised if you go asking the flight attended for a juice instead of a fizzy drink, unless you’ve got a pair of headphones to cancel out the noise, that is.

Have you ever been struck by a tomato juice craving while on a flight? Let us know about it in the comments section below.

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